Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 775.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
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[1] From: Hartmut Krech <kr538@uni-bremen.de> (15)
Subject: Ancient Greek word formation
[2] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (39)
Subject: metaphorical autism?
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2004 06:55:50 +0100
From: Hartmut Krech <kr538@uni-bremen.de>
Subject: Ancient Greek word formation
Dear list members,
the influence of programming languages upon the shape of human reasoning
has repeatedly been the subject of discussions on this list. I am
interested in possible forerunners to this interrelationship between
language morphology and scientific conceptualization. How has the formation
of new philosophical terms in ancient Greek been furthered by the
availability of suffixes like -eia, -ika, -tor, -mat etc. ? I will be
grateful for any references to secondary literature from the field of
classical Greek philology as well as on the interrelationship between
language and scientific terminology at large. Thank you in advance.
Best,
Dr. Hartmut Krech
Bremen, Germany
The Culture and History of Science and the Humanities
http://ww3.de/krech
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2004 07:00:42 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: metaphorical autism?
The entry for "autism" (mod. Latin, autismus) in the OED defines it as, "A
condition in which a person is morbidly self-absorbed and out of contact
with reality"; all the illustrative quotations attest to a clinical
meaning, from the first,
>1912 Bleuler in Amer. Jrnl. Insanity LXIX. 874 When we look more closely
>we find amongst all normal people many and important instances where
>thought is divorced both from logic and from reality. I have called these
>forms of thinking autistic, corresponding to the idea of schizophrenic
>autismus.
The word is used metaphorically, however, e.g. by the computer scientist
Peter Wegner (Brown), who in a number of places argues that, "algorithms
are autistic" (see e.g. http://jeffsutherland.com/papers/wegacm.pdf); and
by a group of delightfully renegade economists in the "post-autistic
economics network" (http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/news.htm), among
the members of which the term is attested in Spanish and French. As the
editor of the Post-Autistic Economics News says, the 1941 Webster's
definition, "Absorption in phantasy to the exclusion of interest in
reality" is "a perfect fit for the current state of economics". He claims
that from childhood he knew the term in the metaphorical rather than
medical sense.
Wegner's line of argument roughly coincides with Terry Winograd's, for what
the latter calls "interaction design". Wegner says basically that the
Turing Machine model of computing is transcended by the interaction machine
model, quoting Alan Perlis's term, "Turing Tar-pit". (See the 54th of
Perlis's Epigrams, "Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is
possible but nothing of interest is easy",
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html; those here who are
not American may not detect the implicit reference to the La Brea Tar Pits,
for which see http://www.tarpits.org/.) Since at least for us the really
interesting bits of computing happen when the machine interacts with the
world, Wegner's use of autism is relevant here. Can anyone shed light on
the non-medical occurrences of the word, e.g. on other domains of application?
Yours,
WM
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Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
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